I forgot to do the traditional birthday photo, so this is 52 + 1 day, no make-up, no filter (unless ‘studio light’ counts as a filter…?).
People asked if I had a good birthday — I did, in the end, but to be honest, I woke up in a pretty mopey mood. It wasn’t about my birthday — I’ve been down for a few days, I think because I haven’t been writing. Which is another post, I think; it’s complicated.
But I’ll just note that I did manage to cheer myself up reasonably well for my birthday — I went to a nursery and bought myself some plants to start. It’s not an ideal planting time (with temperatures hitting 100), but on the plus side, all the nurseries are starting to put their perennials on big sale, so you can get nice big plants more affordably than normal, and if you keep them watered, they should do fine.
Some the plants I’ve planted yesterday and today: a big purple heuchera (Wildberry), a orange-red echinachea (Cheyenne Spirit), a dark pink cardinal flower (Starship Deep Rose), an orange kniphofia, and a few garden phlox. Building out the bed just to the west of the writing shed — it was mostly green this time of year, and I thought it deserved a little more color. Also picked up a few hibiscus and a mandevilla — tropicals are cheap right now, and if you have room to overwinter them indoors, they’ll survive just fine.
After planting some (and thank you to Mother Nature for the downpour yesterday morning, best birthday gift, saving me hours of watering time through three days of close to 100F heat), I spent an hour organizing in the basement. I think I have 2-3 hours to go down there to get it decently organized; hoping to finish that before end of summer, which is bearing down upon me like a freight train. Classes start 8/21, and prep starts sooner…
Then came upstairs to find the kids had returned from clay camp bearing gifts, or rather, bearing sweet treats from SugarFixé. There was a lemon bar (not pictured) and a chocolate-tiramisu torte thing (delicious — that pic is with 4/5 of it gone…) I also got sushi from Sen for dinner, always delicious.
Kevin had gotten me a board game I’d requested, and suggested we could play together, but I told him that what I’d actually prefer for a birthday activity is that we all spend an hour on organizing the playroom. Which we did, with no grumbling from the kids, hooray. Birthdays are useful. I think we have about 2-3 hours left on the playroom too. Finish before end of summer? We’ll see.
And there was some re-watching of Jane the Virgin with Kavi, and some watching of Breeders and Wynona with Kevin, and oh, I made the kids snuggle on the couch and watch an episode of Great Pottery Throwdown with me, because they’re taking pottery classes this week and next week, so that was all nice.
And my birthday fundraiser for the SLF has raised about $1500 so far, which is terrific — we’re raising funds to provide stipends for our interns this coming year. It’s not going to be full salary rate this year, but they do get course credit, and it’ll definitely help. Eventually, I’d love us to offer a fully paid internship — maybe in a few years, if we can continue to grow the SLF. The FB fundraiser runs for another 6 days, so we’ll see if we can make it to $1800 — that’d let us do $900 / semester this year, my current goal.
So all in all, a good birthday, even if it started out sad and a bit weepy. I guess the birthday magic kicked in.
Stephanie is coming by at 9:30 to help me with my e-mail — we’re making progress on that, although I’m a little dubious that we’ll make it to Inbox Zero by the end of the summer. We’ll see.
And then after that, driving practice with Kavi, therapy, and then I’m unscheduled — I’ll likely take a few hours’ break, and then try to work in the evening again, in between doing some cooking for the refugees — we’re providing another meal on Saturday, and I promised to take the kids to the beach tomorrow, so it’d be good to get at least some of the cooking done today.
